A member of The Association of Graveyard Rabbits~~~~
As I say in my Find a Grave profile,
"There is a story under every stone".
While photographing graves for Find A Grave or genealogy research, I have come across many interesting stories about the people buried under those tombstones. In this blog I will share some of the most interesting of these stories with you. Why? So these people will not be forgotten.
~~~~~Jim Craig - Evanston, Illinois USA - Contact me at: jwcraig11@comcast.net

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

WHAT IS THAT ON HIS TOMBSTONE??? - Wallace Rader

Yesterday on my lunch hour I went over to the Irving Park Boulevard Cemetery to do a Find a Grave photo request (what else?). After I had taken the photo as I walked back toward my car, I looked over the tombstones to see if any looked interesting - then I saw the stone for Wallace Rader:

What is the significance of the hooded figure in the center of the tombstone? Sure looks like the Ku Klux Klan to me. But I can't believe the cemetery would have approved that design. My cousin said "maybe that's why his wife didn't want to be buried with him". Someone else said it was the angel of death - but I don't think the angel of death wears a white hood.

I checked his death certificate - he was a carpenter. I couldn't find an obituary and I couldn't find anything about him on Google or ancestry.com other than census information and his death certificate. So I put it out there to you all in the blogosphere - what is this on Wallace Rader's tombstone?

2 comments:

This was 1929, and the world's view of the KKK was much different that it is today. There are plenty of stones throughout GA where references to Klan membership are noted. I've never seen one with the hooded figure,but I have seen other notations.

He could well have been a Klansman. Keep in mind, for much of the 1920s the KKK was a reasonably respectable lodge in most of the country. After the big scandal in Indiana, it started hemorrhaging members, but there had been a lot of them before that.